"FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... So well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."

The article is really informative, I recommend reading it to anyone who is interested in the development of FreeBSD, bot also to users wo would ask: "Why should I try it?"

My experience with ZFS on FreeBSD has been really really good. I haven't found any problems as of yet.

I'm interested in how can ZFS data be accessed in cases of emergency (rescue system, maintenance operations); with UFS storage partitions, I didn't have any problems using linve system CDs (based upon FreeBSD) or the rescue system on the / partition. The features of ZFS are really cool and would be an improvement over the traditional way of partitioning in FreeBSD.

NB: While everything works, it's okay. But only in the case of a failure you can see how valueable your tools are.

I recommend trying it out.

I fear I'm note brave enough to try it on my production systems... :-)

FreeBSD 7 has introduced a huge number of improvements. You really can't appreciate it until you install it on your system and watch it work for yourself. It's truly a big step forward.

Whenever FreeBSD offers a new release, I'm happy that it is my main OS (next to Solaris), I use it on servers and desktops since the days of 4.0. Every release gives a speed improvement on the same (!) hardware, something that I'm really missing on non-BSD OSes. Stability, easyness of use, userfriendlyness, the tidy system architecture and of course the excellent documentation (manpages, handbook, comments in sources) are really appealing to me.